Don't know how to deal with the "why" feeling even though I've been living with MI since I was in single digits. Spoiler: assorted babbling about being white upper middle class with tws for suicidal ideation etc I have been depressed for as long as I can remember. I still am, even on meds. Dysthymia is probably the more appropriate word. If everyone else's emotional baseline of "normal" is at 5 for average on a scale from 0-10 with 10 being incandescently happy, mine was at a 2 before meds and is up to between 3.5 and 4.5 with. One of my most striking childhood memories is of playing Soap Opera at recess and miming hanging myself. For drama, yes, but I'm fairly sure that's not normal. I still remember being crushed every time I tried that, because no one paid it any attention; the clique leader was in control and basically no one cares whether I lived or died in the soap opera. The first poem I ever wrote, in sixth grade, centered around the word "invisible." Probably also worthwhile to mention that I was bullied from fourth to seventh grade. At one point the bully verbally attacked me, but it was my hysterically crying friend who was ushered out of the cafeteria by the counselor and consoled for being bullied while I was still at the table, now with no one else on my side, trying to defend myself. The closest thing I ever got to an apology for those four years was "I'm sorry you feel that way." I also remember Mom telling me to suck it up. Other than that, my family wasn't abusive or anything. I had a good relationship with my parents and my brother. And yet I was a depressed little kid. At sixteen I had a night where I was home alone and just sobbing about nothing and trying not to "bother" friends for consolation when I could just walk downstairs to the kitchen and get a knife. I had those thoughts on and off since sixth grade. Also had a repeat prayer that I would get cancer because better people than me were falling to it and I was "strong enough" to handle it--really it was just a disguised death wish. I don't understand. I have every advantage in life (despite my interior baby bits). My parents are supportive. My brother is great. And yet I'm diagnosed MDD, GAD, and BPD. Knowing that it's chemicals doesn't help. Just. Why is this my life, why doesn't it ever stop, why? The why that bothers me the most is BPD. Like, depression, chemicals, whatever. Anxiety, runs in my family although no one in my family got help for it until I had my breakdown. But BPD? The one that's all "well obviously something bad happened to you"? How did that happen? I feel like shit because I don't have a reason. There is no reason for me to be depressed or anxious. There is no explanation for BPD. And then I check the ITA forum and everyone just has these heinous stories and I get it. That's legit. That's a reason. Bad things happen to people and people get changed by it. But nothing bad has ever happened to me. Not like that. And so I just feel like. Why am I talking. There are people with actual reasons. And I'm treated like one of them when I'm not. I'm taking away from people with legitimate problems. I'm just babbling at this point but this is something that's really upset me for a long time. I don't know how to feel.
You don't need an abuse history to have stuff in your brain be weird or messed up. It doesn't work like that. It's just that mentally ill people in general statistically experience more abuse as more convenient targets for abusers, I suppose? And there it makes it seem that every mentally ill person ever has been abused. But mental illness can be there before abuse happens. There is not actual olympics of who is more abused. Being privileged (yeah except did being rich save me from family abuse? nope) doesn't mean that you can't have problems. There are shitty people out there who think that it is so, but it's not true. There's not a finite amount of help for people with stuff. *hugs* PS. A parent telling their child to suck up what seems to be bullying to me is not actually very responsible of them. :/
For what it's worth, I'm fairly sure I have BPD without any external abuse/whatever situation that could have possibly caused it. All my interactions with authority figures were strongly positive, and even when I was a weird little kid and other kids tried to bully me, I didn't actually realize that's what they were doing until years later, and yet here we are. I wrote in to Seebs once about possible BPD sans abuse, and my best guess is that it's the stress of interfacing with the world with all my other brainweird going on. As far as BPD goes, maybe nobody abused me, but once I realized how badly I was connecting with other people and how badly I was coping in general, it created a nice feedback loop of mounting stress, increased (failed) efforts to do the human thing better, and I'm pretty sure I came out the other end with at a personality disorder of some kind. Abuse might be a potential cause, but I think it's also possible to just lose the brain chemistry lottery really, really badly. Even if you weren't actively abused, it sounds like there were a decent number of times you didn't get the support you needed, and as a kid already dealing with a tough situation, I can definitely see how that would push things worse and worse.
First of all, you have every right to talk about this. Your problems are valid, regardless of your history and background. That you're suffering at all is enough. Second of all, I don't know how well this may or may not apply to you, but I've learned recently that a lot of people consider BPD to be a common consequence of being autistic, especially in women/people socialised as women, and in combination with the whole concept of BPD being skewed by archaic sexist concepts of female hysteria. In other words, a lot of borderline traits can be a direct reaction to autistic experiences, especially when those experiences are not understood and supported.
Replying again to add that this corresponds pretty closely to my personal experience. That sounds pretty on-point for how I think I got to where I am.
(Girl-shaped.) I never even considered that I might potentially be autistic until earlier this year. I told my parents I was looking to get an official diagnosis and they didn't believe me. I don't think anyone would. It's weird to think that trying to be normal is what might have given rise to BPD. It's hard for me to accept that I might just have lost the genetic lottery. I want to believe that I can get better someday. How can I possibly be normal if I'm always going to be fighting an uphill battle? What if this is the most I can expect from myself for the rest of my life? I don't want to settle if I could have better but I don't even know what that would look like. There's not a time in my life I can recall as being healthy. I don't want to be like this but I don't... Bluh.
At least as far as the BPD side of things goes, I can tell that I'm dealing with it better than I did a few years ago. I'm pretty sure I was an unholy terror in my teens, I remember my mom legit crying over how I used to be such a sweet kid, and then... teenagerhood. And in college, even though I was better than that, I was still having semi-regular blowups where I lashed out hard at my closest friends, where things, in retrospect, were probably BPD-driven. I'm honestly surprised I still have those friends, I wouldn't blame them if they'd run. I've only had one blowup like that in the last two years, and now that I know what splitting is, I've gotten really good at catching myself doing it and I'm finding ways to divert my brain to get myself back on an even keel. I made a point of pursuing hobbies that would get me plenty of praise and validation, and I've learned to keep things like number puzzle games on hand because they reel me back in when I start to dissociate or they're a convenient distraction when I have to bail out of an emotionally loaded situation. Even though depression and anxiety are spiraling out of control for me right now, I can seriously feel myself improving on the BPD front. It's like... my brain is a cartoon villain laying pitfall traps and disguising them, and I'm getting the knack at spotting and avoiding them. And once in a while I still fall in the pit and everything is awful and I'm the worst person in existence and it's no wonder I'm lonely because who in their right mind could stand to be friends with me, but things swing back up eventually, and then I'm that little bit better at spotting the pit. I can't really pin it down, but I think figuring out what BPD was was my biggest turning point, and then I was able to take a step back and see exactly how it was affecting me, and things have been consistently uphill from there. It felt extra awful at first, since that was the first time I knew that I was in that kind of position, but it's been consistent improvement since. I'm pretty sure that doesn't work for everyone, but I feel it might be more effective in cases like this, where there isn't obvious abuse or any other kind of big initiating trigger. And I hate having to start fighting towards 'happy' from such a disadvantaged position, I do get intensely bitter over how many unfair setbacks I've managed to score, but I can feel this one becoming less and less of a weight on me with time. I have to have my workarounds for it, which is a drain that most people don't have to deal with, but I've found it to be like dealing with my peanut allergy or asthma, where someone new to it would struggle, but I've been doing the dance for so long that it's mostly instinctive at this point. I'm working toward that still with BPD, and I wouldn't call it easy, but it is definitely getting easier.
i keep thinking about the things seebs says about bpd, that it's basically a result from not having been validated. how can that be it? like, my family was never abusive or anything, they just pushed me really hard because they knew i was capable of a lot. they also tended not to believe me when i said i felt like shit for mental reasons. i remember calling into work one day with a migraine (really just overload) and being yelled at until i cried because i was missing too much. also as an additional garnish i told my brother yesterday that i was pretty sure i was autistic and he said, and i quote, "no you're not, if you were you wouldn't even be functioning." and i just sort of stared at him like. i came to stay with you this weekend because i had a mini breakdown, i'm not functioning. and then he was like "no, you'd be like. drooling nad hitting yourself." so... yeah. i mean, he's probably right. how could i not know something like that until i was an adult. basically i still don't feel great about things. especially the bpd issue. i just want to go back to therapy and figure out exactly what the fuck is wrong with me and why.
Your brother clearly doesn't understand how autism works. How many of us on here are currently, at this very moment, drooling and hitting ourselves? Some, I'm sure, but not like... all of us at any given moment. Not how autism works, spectrum condition, etc etc Anyway - if autism is actually the underlying cause of borderline traits, then that doesn't mean you're screwed; quite the opposite. It means that you can learn how those traits arose, identify negative patterns, and replace maladaptive coping mechanisms with positive adaptations that acknowledge and respect your innate differences, rather than just trying to suppress them. Even if autism isn't the underlying cause, you can still do that. Knowing yourself and knowing your brain will help you to recover; acceptance of your differences is a key part of working with them, rather than against them, in order to improve your well-being.
So there is a big difference between a lack of validation and actual abuse. It is entirely possible for you to not receive validation as a child, particularly if you are intelligent. I've keyed a lot of my issues with impostor syndrome to a lack of validation. Dad would constantly criticize what we did because he wanted us to be better. Regardless of winning or losing at sports we would get a lecture about every mistake we made because that way we could avoid making them next time and be better sportsballers. He never had anything positive to say, not because he didn't love us but because he wanted to see us live up to our potential. Seriously, you want to see me break down into a disgusting ball of tears and snot? Get my dad to tell me that he's proud of me. No seriously, I'm choking up just typing this. Mom was similar with school work. If we complained or felt bad we would get that overly positive, no you're wonderful, the best thing ever language. "You're so smart. You have so much potential." THAT ISN'T VALIDATION. It's actually invalidating the negative feelings we have about our performance. So nothing we did was right but if we said that we felt that way we would get saccharine platitudes that told us how we felt was wrong. This is a great way to end up with a total inability to find a sense of self and determine your self-worth and value in what you do. The worst part is all of this came from love. It wasn't disregard or deliberate abuse, it was just people not understanding how children grow and need feedback. I think it was endemic to the 80s and 90s. Sadly, I haven't found a way to deal with this short of talking to those around me and telling them that I need honest feedback on what I'm doing. But this means that it only comes from people I trust enough to tell. *shurgs* I'm sorry. *hug*
yeah, i think for the first few years of my life my mom didn't have that thick of a skin around my dad. it's only more recently (from high school on) that i remember her telling him that he didn't get to tell her how to feel. that's a huge red flag for me pretty much always. Spoiler: tangent i was on witness duty for a mock trial competition and i had to be the defendant widow in a murder for hire case. when i was cross-examined the second time, the prosecution's theory was that i (the character) had a motive, and that motive was anger. i was super dehydrated or i probably would have cried on the stand at the constant "and that made you feel angry, didn't it?" i told him afterwards that he should never, ever tell a woman* how she feels. he wasn't married, so i'm guessing that's why he didn't know that.
